The present invention relates to methods of routing received telephone calls, and more particularly to a method of routing a received call to one or more of plural telephone numbers at which a called party may be reached which simplifies the called party's acceptance of the call.
Busy individuals, particularly business people, may have several telephone numbers at which they can be reached, such as numbers for a portable wireless phone, a pager, an office phone, automatic voice-mail, a manual message service, etc. ("Wireless" refers to any conventional cordless telephone connection, such as mobile, cellular, etc.) When a call for the individual is received at a local switching system, such as a company's PABX, the switching system routes the received call as last directed by the individual. In the absence of such directions, the call may be routed to a predetermined number, such as the office phone or a pager. The pager alerts the individual that he has received a call by aural indication or some other less intrusive means such as vibration. The individual then may connect to the received call on the wireless phone by entering special codes or a sequence of keystrokes on the wireless phone.
This arrangement works satisfactorily for some, but is not without room for improvement. For example, the called party would like to reduce the number of key strokes required to connect the called party to the received call on the wireless phone in response to the page, preferably to a single stroke. Further, the called party would like to limit the routing of page requests and calls to the wireless phones during certain periods, such as by limiting pages and calls to those from predetermined numbers during an important meeting.
Accordingly, it is an object of the present invention to provide a novel method of routing telephone calls to plural telephone numbers at a which a called party may be reached which obviates the problems of the prior art.
It is another object of the present invention to provide a novel method of routing telephone calls which reduces the number of key strokes needed to connect a wireless phone to a received call in response to a page, preferably to a single key stroke.
It is yet another object of the present invention to provide a novel method of routing telephone calls which automatically screens incoming calls and routes calls to the called party's page and wireless phone or to the called party's answering system.
It is still another object of the present invention to provide a novel method of routing telephone calls in which incoming calls are automatically screened based on the identity of the calling party and in which some calls are routed in parallel to the called party's pager and wireless phone and other calls are routed to the called party's answering system, and in which the called party may respond to a page by connecting to the received call without laborious entry of key strokes because the incoming call has been routed in parallel thereto.
These and many other objects and advantages of the present invention will be readily apparent to one skilled in the art to which the invention pertains from a perusal of the claims, the appended drawings, and the following detailed description of the preferred embodiments.